CS Professor Erez Zadok received $130k from NSF to work with Harvey Mudd College on a national computer network system.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced close to $300,000 in funding for the project CI SUSTAIN: National File System Trace Repository. The project will help solve the challenge of providing researchers with sufficient data sets and traces to the system they are studying.

According to Professor Erez Zadok, Stony Brook’s principal investigator (PI) on the project, “The primary goal of this research is to address performance bottlenecks experienced by researchers. We will tackle this problem by creating components that sustain and enhance a national repository of traces (and utility programs) that capture and analyze file system, storage, and input/outputs. ”

Working with Professor Geoff Kuenning, the PI at Harvey Mudd College, the team helped develop the successful Storage Networking Industry Association’s I/O Tools, Traces and Analysis (IOTTA), a national repository for file system traces. Of increasing value to researchers working on a diverse projects, the repository was essentially built to last just a few years. However, with this new funding from NSF, Zadok and Kuenning will be able to continue operating the repository for years to come, keeping it accessible to storage system researchers. Specifically, they intend to use the new funding to create new tools and mirror sites that will expand capacity, efficiency, and utility of the trace repository.

With the incorporation of traces for new and emerging applications, the national repository will continue to be of great importance to the software engineering and research communities. It is useful for researchers to have a set of activity traces for storage systems to understand the access characteristics. Potentially, these traces will help optimize flash-based solid-state storage and other emerging non-volatile memory based storage technologies.

About the Researcher

Professor Zadok is a member of the Smart Energy Technologies cluster at Stony Brook University. He earned his PhD in computer science from Columbia University and he leads the File Systems and Storage Lab (FSL). The recipient of a 2008 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, in addition to file systems and storage, Zadok’s areas of interest include operating systems, energy efficiency, performance and benchmarking, security, and networking.